Teaching
"The classroom is a place where even the most insignificant thing should be viewed as significant."
(Steven Heller, POP: How Graphic Design Shapes Popular Culture, 2010)
DS 495: Digital Studies Capstone
A culminating course in which students will demonstrate conceptual understanding and creative abilities as they relate to digital studies. Each student will complete a digital project and will reflect on their trajectory through the curriculum and how it relates to future goals.
WRT 200: Introduction to Professional Writing (online and face-to-face format)
Situation-based writing assignments and related readings introduce students to business writing, media writing, and technical writing. Typical assignments include business correspondence, reports, user instructions, brochures, and technical documentation.
WRT 210: Writing with Style
WRT 210 is the close study of the rhetorical dimension of diction, sentence structure, rhythm, coherence, paragraphing, figures of speech, and whole compositions in various genres.
WRT 253: Document Production and Design
WRT 253 provides an introduction to electronic layout, design, and typographic principles as well as the technical foundation and practical experience to produce documents for print production. Students will work from a foundation in rhetoric and basic graphic design principles to write, design, and produce a range of document types.
WRT 307 Consulting with Writers
WRT 307 examines the role consultants play in the development of writers and writing. Students will observe and analyze situations in which writers work together as well as practice response techniques. Readings and assignments focus on different kinds of work associated with assisting writers: consulting, responding, collaborating, and ghostwriting.
WRT 350: Business Communication
WRT 350 provides training in communication skills for business and the professions. Assignments cover varieties of information management, including handling research, gathering data, writing reports, manuals, directions, and correspondence, and making oral presentations.
WRT 353: Visual Rhetoric and Document Design
Visual rhetoric and document design enhances the basic principles of writing learned in WRT 253. Drawing upon aesthetics, practical methods, and research in visual rhetoric, the course examines document design as an audience-oriented form of writing. This course also introduces students to cross-cultural iconography and the quantitative display of information.
WRT 354: Writing in the Global Context: Culture, Technology, and Language Practices
WRT 354 prepares students for the challenges of writing in the global context. Through analysis and practice, students will learn to write and design documents that respond to the needs of local and global audiences in the 21st century workplace.
WRT 455: Multimodal Composing
Multimodal composing prepares writers to make informed choices regarding the mixing of modes in their composing processes. This course explores how media influence what texts accomplish and how they are received. Students analyze and produce texts that integrate words with other modes using a variety of software programs.
WRT 495: Genre and Writing—Capstone
The capstone course is required of all Writing majors. It explores the historical and ideological boundaries that define conventional writing genres: poetry and prose; fiction and nonfiction; literary fiction and genre fiction; academic writing and professional writing; text and hypertext; and so on. The course will consider disciplinary and professional influences on genre definition as well as various ethnic, gender, and economic conceptualizations of genre.
WRT 399: Independent Study
- Writing Technologies and Publication Practices (Fall 2012)
- Creating International Conversations: Writing Centers across National and Cultural Borders (Winter 2014)
- Social Media in the Age of Fake News: The Example of Facebook (Winter 2017)
HNR 499: Honors Project
- Writing in Motion: Using Kinetic Texts in the Writing Classroom (Winter 2015)
- Multimodality in first -year writing courses (Winter 2018)
